Alice Munro has been tilling the arid loam of her native Huron County, a flat and dreary patch of rural southwestern Ontario where nothing has ever happened, for the past 45 years, and—either stubbornly or loyally—declines to expand her milieu.

Southwestern Ontario is my native habitat, too. How flattering to find our humdrum corner of the world made the setting for the first Nobel in literature ever granted to a Canadian! And a short-story writer, at that. The literature prize is a high tribute—to what, exactly, I’ve never been entirely sure, and I await the Nobel Prize committee’s paean to learn the official answer.

But as a southwestern Ontarian, born and bred, I can attest to the withering accuracy of Ms. Munro’s depictions of that grindingly conformist, stonily Calvinist world of humble lives and humbler expectations, where a gnawing sense of shame was inevitable, given the stifling moral parameters, and one’s inner misery was kept as secret as an crazy relative in the attic. Invitingly rich territory for a student of existential and everyday despair.

Hers doesn’t really feel like Nobel territory. A low cloud of modesty over-hangs Ms. Munro’s fictional world—no harrowing diasporas, no heroic sagas, just vignettes of everyday life in perhaps the least colorful, least dramatic setting in North America. And no grand passion—that’s for the Yanks and the Brits. There is instead a clinical quality to Ms. Munro’s work, a dissection of her characters as if they were so many bugs under a microscope. Whose side is she on? The reader can seldom be sure if she’s rooting for or against her protagonists until the story’s denouement, which is seldom a smashing triumph of the human spirit. In fact, most of her oeuvre seems to involve lowering the boom on the undeserving and unwary, then seeing if they can possibly survive it. (The survival rate isn’t high; for an 82-year-old lady, Ms. Munro dishes out an awful lot of tsuris, often of a lethal kind.)

Yet a root part of the Munro magic is that you somehow care deeply about her forlorn losers and their constricted lives. She gets you hoping against hope that they’ll come out O.K. And even when they don’t, she has set up fates of such exquisite and spiritually just logic that you realize there was ultimately no alternative. Ruefully perhaps, certainly sadly, you have to agree: that’s life. Unforgiving, unfair, futile life. If only Alice Munro had lived in, say, Southern California!